Cole Hamels taught us all a valuable lesson, one worth considerably more than the roughly $409,000 in salary he’ll lose during his five-game suspension. In two parts:

1) Having “unwritten rules” implies that they should also be “unspoken.”

2) They’re unwritten and unspoken for a reason.

Of course, Hamels didn’t figure that out until it was too late, until the Philadelphia Phillies lefthander had already snitched on himself about hitting the Washington Nationals’ Bryce Harper with a pitch Sunday night in Washington. The fact that he admitted doing it was priceless (actually, there’s a very explicit price on it); the reason he gave was another level of genius.

Hamels’ expensive explanation: “You know what, it’s something that I grew up watching, that’s what happened, so I’m just trying to continue the old baseball—I think some people kind of get away from it.” He added, “It’s just, ‘Welcome to the big leagues.’ ”

So, he was being “old school.” For that, and for saying it out loud, he hinted pretty broadly that he expected to be embraced by his teammates and by the game itself, for respecting its traditions and honoring its noble past.

Well, you see the hug the commissioner’s office gave him.

The rest of baseball? For starters, Hamels’ own team wonders what he was doing, never mind why he confessed to it so casually. His manager, Charlie Manuel, said he wasn’t real clear on the “old school” rule about plunking rookies just for the hell of it. Getting brushed back after going 4-for-4 or for digging in on an 0-2 count, sure.

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“That’s what old-school baseball was about,’’ he told reporters Monday, “but evidently, we don’t play that way no more.”

Not if you want to keep your money in your pocket or stay in uniform all season, you don’t.

Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro Jr., also didn’t quite get the message Hamels took it upon himself to send—and, as the son of a major leaguer, he supposedly would know. “As far as how the Phillies want to conduct themselves,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer, “we try to take the high road on things like this. By no means are we condoning trying to be injurious.”

Being injurious, of course, probably was exactly the point back when Gibson and Drysdale were drilling guys just to get their attention. Maybe then, a kid as hyped as Harper, as talented and hard-working, as productive and as acutely self-aware, would be a target.

Then again, as Manuel and others have suggested, maybe not.

Of course, everybody could be simply distancing themselves from Hamels and the embarrassment he caused. But, basically, no one seemed very clear on where Hamels had seen his kind of ball being played, and possibly not sure where and where exactly Hamels grew up.

Actually, that makes it even funnier; Hamels is 28 and is a southern California kid, so he came of age at the cusp of the steroid era, on a steady diet of Canseco, McGwire, Sosa and Bonds. Also during his era: bench-clearing brawls and the rules designed to prevent them.

Not part of his era: precocious teenagers shrugging off the hit-by-pitch, then stealing home in retaliation. Harper, apparently, brought his own rulebook and didn’t share it with Hamels beforehand.

It gets better. Curt Schilling weighed in. Granted, there’s not much in life that Schilling doesn’t weigh in on, but he has cred in this area. So, he got on ESPN Radio on Monday and just snapped.

About Hamels’ “old-school” defense, he replied: “What the hell does that even mean? I’m old and I’m a former player, and I don’t understand it.”

He called Hamels “selfish,” “stupid” and “hypocritical” and called his remark “a fake-(expletive) quote.” The rules to which Hamels loyally adhered are “the most nebulous thing in the game,” Schilling continued, adding, “The Bob Gibson days, they’re over; it doesn’t work, people die.”

Finally: “The comment was dumb, in my opinion—and as a lifelong author of dumb comments, I feel comfortable stating that.”

FROM SI:

Which brings us full circle. Schilling was on target—unwritten rules, especially baseball’s, have never been crystal-clear to everyone on the inside, much less to those outside. They change and adapt constantly. There’s a certain logic to them inside the clubhouse … when everybody is caught up on them.

In this case, they appear to work in the clubhouse of Hamels’ mind—and that clubhouse apparently is in Ebbets Field in 1955.

The moral of this whole story: Keep those rules unwritten and unspoken, to keep the world from knowing how dumb the rules really are.